paloma's journal

i am very physically tired and sore right now because the last 2 days at my job, i helped split a bunch of firewood from a huge old sugar maple tree that had to be chopped down recently. normally, they split most of their wood manually with an axe, but the maple wood was very stubborn and also some of the logs were so large in diameter that even at just 18 inches long, they required two people's full strength to roll. (so wide that they seemed more like discs than cylinders.) with a rented hydraulic wood splitter, we were able to process the whole pile, but it was quite a marathon getting it all done in time to return the machine. as david said today when i left, "it was epic."

thor, the dog, was very annoyed at being left inside for his own safety during that whole process.

now it's friday evening, and i've got a few days to rest up and work on my own projects, which thankfully currently do not involve much physical exertion. we are also expecting a blizzard here on sunday, but i don't have to be anywhere until tuesday morning, so i hope that if we get snowed in, we can just hunker down and be cozy in our abode.

p.s. andrei made a cake that tastes delicious, but looks like some kind of halloween prank because it has drippy lemon curd frosting that looks like cartoonish slime. they are also blasting power metal while cooking beet soup as i write this.

i have this weird thing where, if there is something i want to post publicly about, and i haven't done it yet, i can't seem to sit down and write in my journal. i can — and have — done lots of other things in the meantime, but it feels strangely like i am sneaking around in secret. it's one of those weird procrastination brain things. who am i hiding from??

anyway, i finally finished my year in review blog post, which means i am free to do other things that result in public artifacts now! i started wanting to write it about a month ago, but the self-pressure really ramped up when new year's came and went and i still hadn't done it. then i went back to work for two weeks, and i also still hadn't done it. i wrote a little bit in the post itself about why it was a bit difficult to write, but i did it anyway, and i think it came out good enough to be proud of.

in the meantime, while procrastinating the blog post, i started making a suite of tools to make it easier to edit my website. in some sense, this was an extremely ironic way to procrastinate writing a blog post. "once i am finished making this tool, editing my website will be so much easier!" *proceeds to put 30 hours of work into the tool instead of 2 hours actually editing my website*

despite the irony, i am actually super excited and happy with how the tools came out. i really do think they will be a game changer, especially for making image galleries, and making custom gradient styles for my page backgrounds, two especially visual things that i had previously been doing laboriously in a code editor. i ended up building the tools as a static folder of html, css, and javascript files, rather than using a static site generator, because i wanted to keep them extremely minimal and free of external dependencies. along the way, i came up with a way to generate a list of all of the colors used on my website, that updates every time the site gets built, and gets served as a public json file. and then the website tool suite can ingest it and display it as a grid of swatches. i spent a while thinking and trying to figure out how to create swatches and save the data somewhere, only to realize that my website itself is the best point of reference for what colors are used on my website. kind of like self-documenting code or something.

prior to the website-tools project, i did another productive procrastination project in which i spent a bunch of time last week installing some elaborate automations on my smartphone to make it become essentially useless and uninteresting for approximately 12 hours a day. i already don't usually spend a lot of time on phone apps, but i have been wanting to get more sleep, and also have a more focused morning routine that doesn't involve "checking" a bunch of things right after i wake up.

now, i have a custom set of automations where if i log a certain amount of time on my meditation app in the morning, i can use an NFC tag attached to a 3D printed statue of the venus de milo to unlock the more compulsive apps on my phone. otherwise, i have to wait until 10am, when things unlock automatically. then, in the evening, the phone becomes "dumb" again at 10pm. i could theoretically disable these things, but i have set up deterrents that would make it very annoying to do so (and guilt trip me in the process). these are the kinds of things that bring me a weird amount of satisfaction to set up.

i also did another round of printing out my are.na idea cards. i had added 12 new things to are.na over the past couple weeks, so now i have a total of 176 cards. i'm still working through the 4 idea cards i pulled around new year's, but i'm almost ready to pull some more.

a week ago, we hosted a small birthday gathering for my 34th birthday that took place over the holidays (my birthday is the day after christmas). we had to push it forward from december because andrei was sick, but i think that more people were able to make it for the new date anyway, since it wasn't so much in the middle of the holidays. later in the week, we visited andrei's sister's family, and yesterday, i went to a gathering that some other friends were hosting. it's been a pretty social time!

going back to work after my two week break for the holidays was a bit tough because, despite my efforts, my sleep schedule got completely shifted around. so i was very tired for a lot of the first week, and a little bit of the second week. also at work, i helped my boss cut down a pretty huge tree, so that was kind of exciting, and a bit scary.

oh, and one more thing that happened since my last journal entry, is that i helped a client, who is also a family friend, triage and migrate a broken wordpress website. she has had her website running for over 25 years, but she's not a technical person at all so when her website disappeared, she was very distraught. thankfully, i was able to get it working again, but it took a good chunk of time last weekend that i did not expect to dedicate to that.

now, it's sunday evening, and i have tomorrow off because it's martin luther king day. i've still got some stuff i want to get done before my extra long weekend is over, but now that the blog post is done, i feel rather relieved.

ok, this journal entry has enough photos to make up for the last few having none. i took my camera with me today on a trip to the mystic aquarium.

since my last entry, i ended up obsessively going through everything in my password manager since the jurrasic era (2010s). i was planning to spread out the project more, but a part of me just wanted to get it over with, and i guess it scratched a certain itch. a few observations:

• a LOT of the websites i signed up for in the 2010s no longer exist. a reminder of the ephemerality of the web. i'm sure things are popping up and disappearing at a similar rate now, but the things had a different flavor back then.
• privacy policies are great and the GDPR is pretty cool for making it a more widespread (though not universal) practice to allow people to delete their personal data. though some websites say they will but their privacy contact listed in the policy doesn't work or they ignore you.
• when you change your email address for a website login, some companies will take it as permission to re-subscribe you to marketing materials that you had already unsubscribed from on the previous address. insidious!

anyway, i probably should have maintained things better over time instead of creating that trail of abandoned accounts and passwords for defunct websites, but i do feel better having cleaned up what i could.

i was going to do some website updates this week, but they still haven't happened yet. i took some photos of my are.na idea cards for the write-up though!

today, we met up with andrei's sister and her kids at a sri lankan restaurant, which ended up being really delicious. the kids were too cranky to come to the aquarium as planned, so we parted ways after lunch and andrei and i went to the aquarium on our own.

it turned out to be pretty crowded, but we were able to see a lot of really cute and cool animals. they have kind of a lot! dozens of tanks indoors with mostly ocean fish and creatures, and then outside there are penguins, sea lions, and a whole family of beluga whales. i have mixed feelings about humans keeping other species of animals in jail, but it's still neat to get to see them in person. the small percentage of photos that i found interesting enough to share are below...

i think we are officially not sick anymore, but got a bit drained from being out and about in the cold today. i'm glad i don't have to leave the house tomorrow, and can spend my last day of vacation in cozy goblin mode.

it's a new year! i stayed up late.

we didn't really do anything for new year's eve because we are both still a little bit sick. earlier today, i finished up a first draft of a website design i am working on for an artist friend. after banging my head on it for a while, it finally felt like it actually came together, and i wielded some neat css tricks. then, i did one more thing on my bucket list before the year ended: i made a new email address (or rather, got a domain to use for email) to replace the google mail account i have been using for online account logins for the past 10 years.

recently, i've been thinking about data hygiene. well, i think about it pretty often because it's a hot topic in the circles i run in. but the recent trigger was switching my default search engines last week. i already stopped using google search a while ago, but it made me more aware of how google is still lurking too heavily in my online life.

i already have 2 email addresses, one that i use for interpersonal correspondence (which was already a custom domain), and one that i use for online account signups (that was the one that was still on gmail). i wanted to transition the latter to a custom domain so that i could use a catch-all (*) alias and put in different email addresses for each website that i registered an account on. this would allow me to individually track how any given spammer got my address. not that i even get a ton of spam, but having this kind of digital hygiene brings me joy.

anyway, i finally went ahead and got a new, domain name, and hooked it up to a non-google email provider. i won't say the domain name here because i don't want it to be publicly connected to me. (weird to remember that this is a public space even though it's just bits on a raspberry pi behind my desk!)

i changed my login on a few accounts already, but it will take me a while to transition because of the sheer number of logins i've created since i started using my password manager. but the first step is done, and i feel great about it! oh, and using a custom domain name that i own means that i can switch providers in the future without having to repeat this process of going through and changing all of my old logins. (well, as much as anyone can really "own" a domain.)

then, we finished watching the godfather. i wanted to watch it as part of my project to understand more popular culture references. but it's actually kind of a good movie in some ways. sort of a funny choice for a movie to ring in the new year with though.

i want to put more photos in this journal. it's nice for things to feel a bit more visual. when i'm just spending time at home, i tend not to take as many photos. so this is a reminder to myself to play with my camera more.

ok, i have to go to bed now. happy new year, web friends!

over the holidays, i was given a break from work of over two weeks. i'm a bit more than halfway through it now. last week, i had family visiting for a few days, and i caught up on some deep cleaning around the house. then, i was supposed to have a birthday party and then go to brooklyn to visit some friends, but andrei got sick so we just canceled everything and stayed home. i was looking forward to seeing friends, but if i'm truly honest, having a lot of unstructured time at home is very much my idea of a good way to spend time off. plus, i have some things i wanted to work on that would have been more difficult to squeeze in around a trip.

one thing i worked on a bunch recently was making printed cards of all of my are.na blocks. are.na is a platform for gathering and organizing images, links, text, and files. a lot of people use it for research or moodboarding, or as a replacement for what we used to use tumblr for back when i was in college. anyway, it's one of the few online platforms that doesn't feel horrible to use these days, and i have used it sporadically for many years.

anyway, with the new year coming up, i was thinking a lot about what i should work on next and prioritize over the next year. but i had a lot of little notes about ideas of things to do scattered across different text notes and to-do lists. i started thinking about making a little app that i could use to gather and organize and catalog all of my ideas in one central place, so i could look at all of them in a more zoomed-out way and pick a path forward. i sketched out an overview of the kind of application i would like to have -- a collection of networked blocks organized by channels and tags -- and realized that are.na already offered 90% of what i needed. so instead of spending my time building something new, i focused on gathering my ideas all into are.na.

the really awesome thing about are.na is that they have a full API so you can export or do whatever you want with your data on there. i thought for a while about what i could do to close the gap of the remaining 10% of what i wanted to do with my pile of ideas that are.na couldn't already do. instead of building some kind of alternative front-end for are.na, i decided to bring the interaction into the physical world so i could engage with my ideas away from a computer screen. so i made some code that would generate a printable PDF with all of my are.na blocks as cards that i could cut down and have as a deck. i still want to do a write-up of the process on my website, but i shared the code on github. also, my are.na page with all my ideas is fully public. yay, transparency. (i want to write up some of my thoughts about working in public on my website too eventually.)

so between making the code for that, and cutting down 164 cards, i spent a decent chunk of time on that. but i'm very pleased with the result. now pretty much all of the things i want to do are available to me in physical form. i can shuffle through and review them, or to a tarot-style pull to decide what i should do today. sometimes, the pressure of making a decision can be stressful when there are too many options and you know you probably can never do them all. so randomness can be really helpful as a means for removing creative blocks. see also: brian eno's oblique strategies cards.

anyway, i'll save more of my thoughts on that front for my website. other stuff i did: i made another track for my friend brenna and my mutual accountability project. it didn't exactly come out amazing, but that wasn't really the point; i spent a few hours on it, i explored some new techniques and learned a bit, and i made more of a "song" than i have since i stopped making music regularly a few years ago. so far, after two rounds of our accountability music making project, i am feeling very good about it. speaking of randomness as a way to get past blockages, deadlines (even "artificial" ones like shaking a friend's hand and saying "i will send you a track on this day") can also help a lot. actually, that is something i like about zine club as well!

i have some more stuff i need to do this week. most of it is not under the same category of open-ended creative work, but i'm feeling good about the direction things are going, once i have some more time to return to it.

i also have been playing cyberpunk 2077. i am only about halfway through the main plot, and it's kind of occupying the part of my brain i normally use for a book i'm reading, so i've been resisting starting a new book until i'm finished. but i'm also playing it really slowly. oh well, books can wait for now.

wow! i woke up this morning and everything was covered in snow. exciting!

we walked to a cafe and had some brunch. then i played with the modular synth for a while. a friend and i are doing an accountability partnership where we both make a new song (can be rough) every other week and send it to each other. mine had a sound in it that sounded like a sad robot singing.

i've been thinking a lot about creativity, art, and what my goals are. i just found out i have over two weeks off for the holidays and i'm starting to think about what i want to do with my time. of course, much of it will also be spent relaxing and hanging out with friends and family. but i have been wanting to try new things, and it's hard to decide what to focus on when there are so many things that interest me. so i feel like i should also take the time to zoom out a bit and choose some directions to go next.

hmm, it's been over a week since i wrote in here. a lot has happened, but i haven't felt too much like typing things out. in this time of year, with dark, cold weather, i seem to have a natural urge to rest and not do too much beyond what feels necessary. so i haven't been sharing much online or in general. i normally do those things a bit more frequently (making blog posts and newsletters and the like), but i'm trying to give myself a break and not feel pressured.

this journal isn't a place where i really feel pressure to write, but writing in here is like, an artifact of me mentally processing things. and weirdly right now i haven't felt like taking a ton of time to process. but it doesn't feel like things are pent up or building up. things just happen and they seem to leave less of a trace afterwards sometimes. i actually stopped journaling for a long time at one point because of this. anyway, i'm not abandoning this journal; i know it will still be here when i feel the need to write more again.

anyway, here are some updates on current events in my life. soon after my last entry, i picked up andrei from the airport and we went to a szechuan restaurant and then went to two different specialty grocery stores. one of them was a chinese grocery store and one was eastern european. we got a bunch of stuff for the house, including bulk goods and seasonings. i found a really good relaxing tea blend that claims to be "hypnotic." (i assume that they meant it makes you sleepy.)

last week, i got back into the swing of work post-thanksgiving-break, and managed to start getting to bed earlier again, and also went back to the gym for the first time since then. i've stopped doing the work trade at the yoga studio and started doing the free yoga class at the community center where my gym is. the quality of teaching isn't the same as it was at a dedicated studio, which is to be expected, but it is a much better option for right now when i'm not able to commit to the volunteer work each week. anyway, the sleep and exercise together resulted in me feeling good for most of the week. aside from a random episode of stomach cramps on thursday night, which i couldn't pinpoint the cause of.

on friday, andrei and i did some errands together. we went to my eye doctor and i picked up my glasses, which had been re-lensed with a stronger prescription. i'm still getting used to them; my vision is sharper, but the amount of difference between each eye is a bit disorienting. it's been less than a week, and i'm adapting more over time, so hopefully i'll be able to adjust to them, and start using my right eye slightly more.

over the weekend, i did a bunch of house chores, played video games, and worked on a new piece of furniture for the living room (a baltic birch plywood cabinet with a dual purpose of redirecting the hot air from the vent so it doesn't blow directly at the heads of people sitting on the couch). i glued and assembled it with screws over the weekend, and then applied water-based polyurethane on monday morning so it could dry while i was at work.

yesterday was tuesday, and we did a visiting artist workshop for our friend anna's video performance class at hamilton college in upstate new york. we had to leave at 7am to get there to set things up, since it was over 4 hours away, so it was a long day. she also asked me to talk to the students about the fediverse, personal websites, and decentralized platforms in general. some of the students were very tired from studying for their finals, but they still seemed to enjoy exploring the analog video equipment we set up. in the evening, we went out to dinner with anna and jason, another friend who teaches russian at hamilton.

so this morning, we set out on the long drive home, which was delayed and slowed by a veritable blizzard. after taking refuge for a while in crazy otto's diner in herkimer, ny, we slowly made our way east, towards the coast and away from the weather systems of the great lakes, until the roads cleared up enough that we could drive at a normal speed again. now we are about an hour away from home, and i'm looking forward to that.

so, that's it for now. more... later? i'm not sure when, but as i alluded to at the beginning of this post, i might take a bit of a break from more regular updates.

it's been a quiet week with the house to myself. i didn't really celebrate thanksgiving, beyond catching up with family over the phone. i spent most of the actual holiday at the makerspace, working on stuff for zine club, which, if i'm honest, is kind of an ideal way to spend a holiday. as much as i like my family, longer periods of time off work are precious, and i often prefer to spend them at home, working on my own stuff and chilling out.

i have been feeling a bit anxious lately, and i've noticed that positive things in my life can sometimes feel like they fade into the background, while points of friction and difficult things continue to come to the foreground and be more noticed. i'm usually a fairly optimistic person, but recently i've been observing more of that "negativity bias" thing, which i've read about and know is fairly common. frankly, i think thanksgiving is kind of a bullshit holiday, and i'm wary of the potential for gratitude practices to become exercises in toxic positivity. but with those caveats, i decided to make a list of things that i am grateful for, so that i can look at it when i feel like my mind is fixating too much on the negative. but since i also don't want to avoid my problems, i included a list of things that frustrate me as well. i guess i'm hoping that acknowledging both the things i'm happy about and the things that frustrate me about my life right now will help give me a more balanced perspective. and having lists of things that i update over time can sometimes make me more aware of things, because i'm subconsciously looking for stuff to add to my list.

i'm not gonna share my lists here, as they are a bit personal, but i thought i'd share the idea of the practice. reading about how other people process and organize their thoughts is interesting to me, so i'm doing the same.

tomorrow i'm picking andrei up from the airport, and the next day i'll be back at work, so my mini-vacation (which i've somewhat ironically spent working just as hard as usual) is coming to an end soon. today, i'm planning to pack and prepare this new batch of mystery objects for shipping. (they came out really nice, i'm excited to send them out.) i might watch some battlestar galactica while doing some of the more rote tasks. and maybe i'll have some time to play video games if i finish the whole thing up before too late in the day.

my boss gave me an old pair of insulated carhartt overalls that had been sitting in his basement for a while. they were very dirty, the shoulder straps were worn out, and the legs were far too long for me. so that was my excuse to spend several hours watching battlestar galactica while hemming and repairing them.

i sew by hand, which for this task was difficult due to the thick layers of tough canvas, but i eventually managed to take in the legs, hem them, and replace the straps with fresh elastic. i also dyed them dark gray, which helped a lot with making them not look super stained. now they just look a little bit stained which is actually a huge improvement; i didn't take a before picture, but they were beige, so you can probably imagine. also they match the rest of my clothing better now.

i should probably do the badge process to get access to some of the sewing machines at the local makerspace. they have a sailrite machine there, which would have made quick work of these bibs. but then i would have had to leave my house and not watch battlestar galactica...

i've mostly been hibernating because of the cold weather and spending 4 days last week doing construction work. andrei is traveling to visit family, so i've spent the past couple days enjoying the quiet and warmth of my apartment, playing video games, and doing some prep work for some art/object-making projects i have coming up soon.

i have to leave my house again to work again tomorrow, so i'm mentally preparing to go back out into the cold. at least now i have more insulated pants options...

we started prepping to pour the concrete slab at work today. i found out that:

1. i can lift an 80 lb bag of concrete mix (well over half my own body weight)
2. i probably won't feel great afterwards though

my work peeps gave me some of their old stuff including a pair of insulated carhartt overalls. they could use a bit of repair but now i have 3 pairs of good outdoor work bottoms for cold weather, yay!

hmm, it's been another week or so! it's sunday night, so i'm getting ready to go back to work tomorrow. this weekend has been somewhat chill, mostly compared to last weekend, when our friend from out of town came to play a show and we stayed up late every night and also had a dinner party.

side note: thankfully, someone came and fixed our leaky ceiling before we were planning to host, so we didn't have to cancel our plans.

i went to a new eye doctor for the first time last monday, and they scanned my corneas and told me that i had the most extreme astigmatism they had ever seen. i already knew that my corneas were mis-shaped, but that fact coming from an opthamologist impressed me. thankfully, my vision is surprisingly good given this, and i got what i needed treatment wise, but i also got a referral to a specialist and some colorful print-outs of the current state of my eyeballs. (see below for an image of one of the scans; for reference, most people's eyes look much more like a circle...)

on friday, we went to a show at ely center that our local friends were playing. they did a really cool collaborative performance about exoplanets, including live analog video, guitar, and spoken word. normally, i'm not a big spoken word person, but the performance was really well done (the person spoke like a retro computer-generated voice) and the content was fun (a story about an exobiologist encountering an organism, which reminded me a bit of solaris).

today we met up with some family and went to a museum. it was very cold and windy, and after coming back inside it felt like all my mana had been drained.

let's see... what else has happened?

• andrei put up some dichroic film in the windows in our apartment, and it does cool things when it catches the sunlight (see photos).

• i made a blog post about my mystery objects for zine club! this also involved taking photos of all of the objects. and i have begun work on the next object...

• i started playing cyberpunk 2077 and set up a comfy video game area in my studio. i like to play open world rpgs when the weather gets cold and dark (last year i played baldur's gate 3).

• we watched the first half of david lynch's mulholland drive last night, and will likely watch the rest of it tonight.

• i finished reading cryptonomicon last week. i liked it a lot overall but the ending was a bit underwhelming. i still haven't started another book yet... thinking of starting gene wolfe's book of the new sun series.

• it's cold and the leaves have almost all fallen down. it's also been windy and sometimes rainy. it feels like a good time to stay inside, but i will probably have to do some outdoor work for my job this week (we are pouring a concrete slab for some equipment to sit on). luckily i thrifted a bunch of sweaters and scarves, and i got some new insulated work pants and work boots.

ok, that's all for now. see ya...

the title is sarcasm.

as if things haven't been eventful enough lately, this past sunday, a whole bucket's worth of water started pouring out if the ceiling of my bathroom, right while i was in the middle of taking a shower. eventually we figured out that the top floor unit shower drain pipe started leaking suddenly and profusely, so every time they took a shower, we and the second floor neigbor also received the same shower non-consensually through the walls. our building is very old, so this was not the most unusual thing to happen. due to the complicated logistics of the multi tenant situation, it took a couple days for communication to propagate and repairs to be made, but it seems to be fixed now. (knock on wood.)

when i was living in a studio apartment in brooklyn a few years ago, i had a situation where my bathroom ceiling was leaking for an extended period of time, and i eventually had to move out because it seemed like they weren't going to truly address it. they just kept sending hapless maintenance people who weren't actually plumbers and never actually did anything helpful. so i was really stressed out and worried that this would be a repeat of that situation, and i really do not want to move in the near future. crisis averted, for now.

other than that, it's been a normal week so far. at work we have a deadline to provide paintings for a show next week, so we are doing a big push and i will likely work an extra day this week. i also went to the gym a couple days ago and did yoga class today. my muscles feel sore but good. the weather has been typical autumn; at its nicest, in the afternoons, it is cold but clear and warm in the sun.

i am still reading cryptonomicon. i seem to be 3/4 of the way through. it's very long and meandering, and i'm enjoying it.

all right, time to go to bed.

it's been a month since my last entry, and it's been kind of a nonstop hectic time since i got sick. usually, after i am sick, it takes some time for me to catch up on stuff and resume business as usual... but this time, so much happened directly afterwards that it's taken me until now to start to feel like i'm back to my normal busy schedule as opposed to having a pile of stuff to do that's disproportionately larger than my available time.

ok, so i'll try to back up and gather this past month's events into a semi-coherent narrative. a lot of it is simultaneously complicated and mundane, but i should be able to convey a sense of the overall vibe. this is probably going to be a long post, but hopefully after i catch up with the present, my future journal entries will be shorter and sweeter.

when i left off last time, i was just beginning to recover from being extremely sick for about a week, and had taken off of work to recover. the following weekend, despite not being quite back to 100%, i decided to go through with my previously planned trip to upstate new york, for two reasons.

1. there was a memorial service on sunday for a close friend of mine from grad school who recently passed away; it felt important to make it to this for emotional closure
2. due to complicated family logistics, we needed to arrange to transport a very old and shitty extra car to my house, to be stored in my driveway while some of my family are in mexico for the winter

as mentioned, the logistics of the family car situation were complicated, but in addition to saving my younger sibling from having to manage street parking an extra car, this car was supposed to provide me with backup transportation since my own car, a 2005 subaru, seemed to be having some mechanical issues.

the first leg of this trip involved meeting my sibling halfway between our homes (we live 2 hours apart). andrei, my partner, really wanted to go to this georgian restaurant in westchester, so we met there, had an excellent meal, and then andrei drove the shitty family car back to our house in new haven while i drove my sibling back to their house in kingston in my subaru.

the subaru made it through the first two legs of the trip fine, so the next day, i continued west towards alfred, ny, the town where i went to grad school and the location of the memorial. along the way, i stopped at an outdoor poetry book fair in a random patch of grass in a rural town where my friends brigid and sparrow were doing a performance as their collab project, ball of fire. brigid was one of my closest friends when i was living upstate last year, so i was really excited to hang out with her. and i've also known sparrow since i was a kid, so it was fun to reconnect with him as well. we sat in the grass in the shade of a very wide maple tree, amidst piles of fallen leaves.

after getting lunch from a food vendor at the book fair, i resumed my journey. my gas tank was empty, and there was no cell service to load gps directions, so i stopped at the next random local gas station i passed while following whatever roads i came across that seemed to lead west. i had been trying to be selective about where i got gas, because i was concerned that my car's recent issues were related to a bad tank of gas that i got the previous month, but this seemed to be my only option as i had no idea where the next gas station would be.

well, sure enough, after i filled it up, my car's engine started knocking again. well, i was more than halfway to my friend max's house in alfred, and the memorial was the next day, and i really didn't want to miss it, and the engine knock was not extreme. so i pressed on, while trying to drive as gently as i could and stopping occasionally to let my car cool off. the knocking was happening on and off, but more and more on as the drive progressed, despite me topping off the tank with high octane gas and adding a gas tank additive. i finally arrived at max's late at night, three hours after my original estimate. luckily, max is a night owl, so we jumped in his truck and went to wegman's, a grocery store that is also open late, to get some food to cook for dinner.

max is my old roommate from brooklyn, who coincidentally started the art program at alfred university a few years after i finished my mfa there. it is always excellent to get to see him. being back in alfred was a bit weird for me. i've only been back a few times since spring 2020, which was my final semester, in which the whole campus shut down and i had to finish my thesis work quarantined in my tiny off-campus apartment, where i lived alone, and saw no one for weeks at a time. so when i finally moved back to civilization, i left that place like a bat out of hell. also, my friend leslie, who passed away, was my closest friend throughout my time there, so it was sad to feel his absence and the regret that i didn't get to visit him more since we finished the program together, and he stayed there working as a professor and technician.

the next day, max and i went to the diner and met up with my friend izzy, who also did the same electronic arts mfa program as me and leslie, overlapping with us for one year. izzy brought their partner too, who we hadn't met before but who is very into bicycling and helps run a bike co-op in providence, rhode island, where the two of them live now. it was an unseasonably warm day for october in the finger lakes region, so we ended up going to the swimming hole and hanging out there for several hours.

despite not having brought a proper bathing suit, i impulsively jumped into the freezing cold stream and then alternated between dipping into the water and drying off on sun-heated rocks. i'm not sure if this was the best idea as i was still a little bit sick, but it was very beautiful to see the fall colors on the trees and feel the elements. i thought about leslie a lot because he was a big nature guy.

the actual memorial event was brief, sweet, and kind of awkward. i saw a bunch of people i haven't seen in a long time and they planted a ginko tree on campus in leslie's memory. then afterwards a group of us went to the old mill, and sat outside on their deck and shared conversations around a propane fire pit thing, which warded off the first few hours of cold after the sun went down.

i had initially planned to drive home that night and work tomorrow, but after experiencing the state of my car on the way there, i called out of work for monday and spent that day crawling back home slowly in the subaru. the engine situation wasn't getting better, so i decided to engage the "backup" vehicle when i finally resumed work on tuesday. unfortunately, the shitty extra vehicle owned by my family turned out to be... well, shitty. the whole front end felt loose, so i brought it into the shop and they gave me a repair bill that exceeded the monetary value of the vehicle itself to redo the front suspension system. considering the overall terrible condition of the vehicle, my family declared it scrap.

in between commuting to work in our 1988 camper van, i also brought my sad subaru into the shop for them to check it out. they basically said, all we can do is put fresh 10W-30 in it and hope for the best. well, i didn't have high hopes for that engine, and having a giant van as the sole vehicle owned by me and my partner wasn't an option. i needed to get a new car.

for my adult life, my strategy has been to drive very old cars that i bought for cash or got for free, and maintain them as best i can until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. well, the last two cars i bought — the 2005 subaru, and a 2002 volvo station wagon that died in like 2019 — both ended up being particularly bad investments, lasting me a year or less despite pouring money into repairs.

well, i decided to change my strategy and try to get a newer car this time. for me, this meant joining the large segment of society that has to make payments each month on a car loan. i had a strong aversion to taking on this type of debt, but on paper, the math made sense — if the vehicle was reliable, the monthly payments would have been cheaper than the random, unpredictable repair bills for the old subaru anyway.

so began my quest to figure out how all of this car loan stuff works and managing all of the surrounding logistics. unfortunately, this was very time consuming and required me to take more time off work. i am very thankful to my bosses for their understanding and flexibility during this time!

i'll spare you the details, as they are quite boring, but i became the proud owner of a 2018 honda hr-v. since it seems like station wagons are no longer a thing, this was the closest car i could find to the form factor of my subaru (which i really liked), while also having much better ratings for reliability.

after succeeding in obtaining a new vehicle, which took a little over a week, i immediately shifted focus to clearing out my driveway by selling the subaru and the shitty family car on facebook marketplace for cash. my family's car, a toyota, turned out to be a hot commodity in the overseas parts export market, and sold almost immediately. the subaru went a few days later to a pair of older fellows, who seemed to have a hobby of collecting random vehicles (one of them said he owned 20 cars?!) sadly, i received a call about a week later that the subaru's engine had died. well, i felt kind of bad about that, but i did sell it at a significant discount and with full transparency of the potential engine issues. and i'm pretty sure the guy just kept driving it as-is without addressing the issue. yikes...

that whole car saga really occupied a large portion of my mental energy for the entire month of october! i'm glad it seems to be resolved for now. i wish that my current lifestyle did not require me to even own a vehicle, but the art studio i work for is about 8 miles outside of town in an area completely inaccessible by public transit. and i really like my job.

however, there are a few other things to report that don't have to do with cars or funerals. andrei and i did a short livestream performance for the internet archive's virtual staff meeting, which was very fun. i also made a new section of my website, called notes, which gives me a different way to gather certain pages that i don't want to fall into obscurity with time (like a blog post does when it gets pushed to page 2 or 3 in the feed).

the reason i wanted to make a notes section was that i wanted to write about an art project i've been working on. i started it when i was sick and home from work, and then the whole thing kind of got pushed forward until this past week, when i finally had time to finish some illustrations and gather my notes into a format for others to read. i already described it in depth on my website so i won't go into it here, but here's the link if you want to check it out: palomakop.tv/notes/runicon-cypher

with the completion of my font project and the accompanying e-zine, i finally had something to share with the zine club people, who had been waiting patiently with no updates for me all month. zine club is kind of organized so that each new thing i send out feels kind of like a surprise, so hopefully no one was like, actively waiting and frustrated, but i felt bad about it regardless and i hate missing deadlines. now that i've at least delivered something cool for people to check out, that's weighing on me less. i hope to be back to business as usual with zine club next month, because it seems like these recent hectic events were outliers, and i should have more time to devote to making weird art in the coming month. (knock on wood!) i also hope to reconnect with my online communities more as i've been kind of MIA since all this started. maybe i need to do a new newsletter soon too.

other things that happened since my last entry:

• i went to open studios at erector square, a cool building complex that rents out studio space for artists here in new haven
• met some new people irl from a local tech workers' online chat group
• went to an art opening in hartford that a friend organized and other friend had work in (a cool video sculpture with a fresnel lens)
• co-hosted the first meeting of "music club" at a local library
• continued volunteering on wednesday nights at the yoga studio in exchange for free yoga, and also finally managed to resume going to the gym after taking an extended break when i was sick
• had dinner at a friend's apartment, which is in a building that literally looks like a spaceship
• didn't go out for halloween because i wasn't feeling well and wanted to stay home and work on my zine, but i did go to a dinner party and an art show the next day
• had an incident at my apartment where the upstairs neighbor flooded their bathroom, and ours below (still kind of dealing with this)
• went to thrift stores for fun with andrei, and also when i was upstate i stopped by a very special surplus store that always has the most random old things
• watched the tv show firefly and read the book annihilation and started reading the book cryptonomicon
• today: hiked up west rock (see last 2 photos)

here is some miscellaneous photographic evidence from the past month as well. i think that about covers it. so consider this journal fully up to date (maybe too much so). until next time...

welp, i knew this month was going to be busy, and i did my best to handle it with aplomb. but the result of doing too much in too little time was that i ended up getting very sick (sicker than i have been in a year or more).

perhaps it was inevitable. everywhere i went last week, various people were complaining of various ailments. i guess the changing weather and everyone going back to school, etc. created a perfect situation for people to get sick. i felt a bit crappy last week, but i thought i'd avoided getting really sick... but then on monday morning i woke up with a sore throat that felt like a golf ball and i knew i would be down for the count. i've been off work since then, and it's looking like i might miss the whole week.

last week, i worked three days at my art/fabrication job, then another three days doing event production/video tech in greenwich, CT and brooklyn. it's the tail end of the busy season for the latter job, and working three gigs in a row was a feat of stamina because it's a very physically demanding job. on the last day, i drank a double shot of espresso (they have it in cans for free at the job). my normal amount of daily coffee is zero, so that might not have been a healthy choice. but what's done is done! sometimes you can't just keep that energy level up indefinitely without consequences. but sometimes you can! it was a gamble.

although the last couple days of being sick have passed in a blur, my brain is starting to come back out of the fog, so i'm optimistic that i'll be back to normal in just a few days. in the meantime, i've been watching firefly, drawing, and working on a secret project in between naps.

today, after getting restless legs from lying down too much, i decided to try and take a walk in the park with andrei. we found a huge cluster of chicken of the woods mushrooms. we took some, but there must have been 20+ times that amount still there on the fallen tree it was growing on. i was tired after the walk but it felt really good to get back outside.

what else has happened since the last time i wrote in this journal? let's see...

• i read the book moonbound by robin sloan and enjoyed it. just started annihilation by jeff vandermeer. (i read vandermeer's ambergris trilogy about a year and a half ago, and really liked it but it was extremely dense so i took a long break from his work after that.)
• i got my timing belt replaced. also front brake pads. cautiously; i am hoping that this car keeps going long enough to be well worth that investment.
• i am working on a really fun project for zine club that i can't share yet, but i will very soon. it's been a good distraction from being sick when watching TV isn't enough to occupy my mind.
• my parents flew to puerto rico to begin their travels in latin america for the fall and winter.

other than that, it's just been a lot of work and short breaks in between. i am really looking forward to my schedule taking a more relaxed turn in about a week or so. i guess it will really make me value actually having days when i'm neither working, nor physically incapacitated.

we went for a walk today in edgewood park, which is close to our house. things i saw there included:

• a young swan (a cygnet?) that still had its brownish coat
• blooming goldenrod
• an egret (pictured — i got pretty close to it and saw that it was actually a lot smaller than i imagined)
• cool light reflections under a bridge

i'm still recovering from my red eye commute home the other night after my AV gig in manhattan. luckily, there is not much i need to do today. i want to play a video game, but first i must make more progress on the e-zine i'm working on this month for zine club. also i must go to bed at a reasonable hour.